A strong woman is a woman determined to do something others are determined not be done.
—MARGE PIERCY
EACH TIME I took Vickie and Phillip to the doctor or went to see my own doctor, Dr. Stout, Charles said, “You’re just hunting for somewhere to go.” I didn’t look forward to doctor visits, but I was glad to get out of the house. During the last visit to Dr. Stout’s office, when he couldn’t find anything wrong with my shoulder and knee, both of which had been hurting, he’d commented, “You’re perfectly fine. You just seem a little tired.” I shrugged. He pressed, asking if everything at home was okay. I smiled. Of course it was.
Dr. Stout patted my hand, concerned. “Well, I know it’s not the children. They look fine.” Holding my hand, he continued. “What about Charles? How’s his job?”
I told him that Charles worked as a license inspector for the county. I pulled my hand from his clasp and grabbed Phillip, now about to start school, to stop him from spinning the stool next to the examining table. Dr. Stout started to write something on a piece of white paper, then stopped and took off his round spectacles. Deep grooves cut across the sides of his face from the tight glasses. He wiped the lens with a white handkerchief he took from in his pocket. Placing his glasses back on his face, he commented as he finished writing, “In my experience, if it’s not job troubles, then it’s one of two things.” Finally, I was going to get an answer. “You’re dealing with either an alcoholic or a religious fanatic.”
I shook my head. I’d never thought of Charles as a fanatic about anything, except maybe his coin collection. “No, Charles doesn’t drink. He’s a deacon in our church.” I didn’t say anything else. Neither did Dr. Stout; he simply handed me the piece of paper. I could barely read his scribble. It was a prescription for an antidepressant.
When the door closed behind Dr. Stout, I crumpled up the paper and threw it into the trash can. I couldn’t afford the prescription, and Charles wouldn’t hear of me taking it anyway.
DR. STOUT was right; everything wasn’t fine. I thought about the real answers to his questions on the way home. The only place I went besides the grocery store was the Baptist church. If Charles had his way, we’d have gone to church every day; as it was, we were there at least four times a week. I didn’t know how or when it had happened, but my world had become too small. I still spoke to Sandra some over the phone, and we had dinner with Charles’s family or mine every Sunday, but during these dinners I felt like I was repeating the same conversation. I sometimes worried I’d never experience that sense of wonder you feel meeting a new friend or traveling to a new place for the first time. I was afraid the major milestones of my life, marriage and childbirth, were past. Was it foolish to hope I still had something exciting ahead of me, something even important, that I could have a life of my own?
I had told Dr. Stout that Charles was a license inspector; what I hadn’t explained was the fact that Charles and I had struggled for years to make ends meet. After the GE plant closed, Charles worked part-time at Railway Express Agency. He took the weekend shift that no one else wanted until his supervisor realized how reliable he was and offered him a full-time job. Ten years later the company was sold to Greyhound, so he’d found work as a license inspector, traveling to businesses throughout Calhoun County to verify that the owners were up-to-date with their annual fees. He also checked the status of people’s mobile-home licenses. I worried about his safety—especially after his windshield was shot out. Now the sheriff accompanied him when he issued citations.
What I also hadn’t told Dr. Stout was that Charles’s job was only part-time, and the income, even with his supplement from the National Guard and selling encyclopedias, just wasn’t enough. We had tried to make everything count: eating pinto beans when we were saving for furniture, picking berries in the woods to sell. I even learned to sew the children’s clothes, and I’d go to town and browse the stores to copy the patterns I saw hanging on the racks, just like my mother did. We paid cash for everything we bought, as Charles didn’t believe in credit. The money from the pies I baked and sold to the neighbors and Charles’s unsuccessful peanut- and sweet-potato-growing ventures wasn’t enough—especially when everywhere he worked shut down.
NOT LONG after that appointment with Dr. Stout, I took Phillip to see the pediatrician, Dr. Luther, a tall, boisterous woman who piloted her own plane. I never knew what to expect when we visited her office, decorated with pictures from South African safaris. The summer Vickie caught the measles, she thundered, “Whoever heard of sending a five-year-old to vacation Bible school?” Not once did she let me pay for the children’s medicine, sending me home with boxes of samples when they needed them.
At this visit, Dr. Luther asked Phillip what he’d gotten for Christmas, and he barely answered. She shot her eyes at me, surprised. “Is this the best he can speak?” She signed him up that same day for testing at a rehabilitation center in Birmingham. During the weeks leading up to the appointment, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find myself standing at the kitchen counter eating the cakes Edna baked for us every week. I must have gained twenty pounds by the time we took Phillip for his evaluation.
On the day Phillip was tested the doctors immediately checked to see if he was tongue-tied. I’d thought that was just an expression; to consider it a real possibility was horrifying. Then the doctors put that poor child through every test imaginable. I’m sure they thought that we were straight from The Beverly Hillbillies and didn’t own a refrigerator when Phillip identified the picture of a safe as an icebox. He was right. It looked exactly like the old rusty icebox in Edna’s kitchen, where she stored her sewing material.
The doctors concluded from Phillip’s tests and my interview that he was behind on his speech development because I was so worn out from his chronic allergies and asthma that I didn’t sing and talk to him the way I did Vickie. I’d also taken it for granted that Vickie did all his talking for him, like a little mother hen. He needed speech therapy twice a week to catch up to other children his age.
It tore my heart in two that although I’d given Phillip all I had, still it wasn’t enough. I knew what the doctors had no way of diagnosing: Each day at home, I’d find myself plagued by a discontent I didn’t understand. I was constantly, needlessly restless. I’d hear the dying echo of a delivery truck traveling to its unknown destination, and I’d feel an aching loneliness. I’d been left behind.
THE MARITAL arguments started not too long after Phillip’s diagnosis. I’d taken Phillip to one of his first appointments with the speech therapist. An unusually cold spell had struck that day, and my car broke down on the way home from town. There I was on an empty country road, without one penny to my name and no way to get help. I stared at the flat tire on the dented green Plymouth we’d drained our savings to buy. In pitch darkness, I looked up at the stars and told myself, No more.
Somehow I changed that flat tire by myself, while Vickie comforted Phillip, tired and crying in the backseat. With each twist of the lug wrench, I felt a piece of myself come unhinged. No matter how hard we tried, something always set us back.
With the last lug tightened, I sat back on my heels, my arms aching. I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t live without any savings; I wouldn’t raise Vickie and Phillip without a real future.
On the way home, as the headlights illuminated the endless row of tall, sturdy cedars lining the country road, I silently recited the one psalm I knew by heart: the Twenty-third. I glanced in the rearview mirror; Phillip’s head rested in Vickie’s lap. Her head drooped at an awkward angle against the backseat. From the time I’d brought Phillip home from the hospital as a newborn Vickie had been by my side, my assistant mother. Sometimes I thought she had far more patience than I did. I leaned my right arm across the back of my seat, brushing the cold vinyl, to prop up her head as best I could. I wanted to scoop the children up and hold on to them as tightly as possible, never letting them experience pain or frustration again. Turning into the driveway, the gravel crunching underneath the wobbly tire, I’d made up my mind. I was going back to work.
CHARLES AND I argued about it well past midnight. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t let him be the sole provider—the way things were supposed to be, and had been since biblical times, he said. I couldn’t justify my position in a way that Charles accepted. Countless times in the months afterward we rehashed the same argument: circling each other, the tension in our marriage escalating while my desire for a job grew inside me as relentlessly as kudzu.
When Charles had given Vickie, now in elementary school, only a dollar for spending money for her most recent Sunday-school trip to Rock City in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I was beside myself. Standing in the kitchen trying to follow the recipe off the Campbell’s soup can for the green bean casserole I was fixing for dinner, I shook my head to myself, thinking about Vickie’s embarrassment the day before when she hadn’t been able to buy anything at the gift shop like the rest of the group. I hadn’t had a chance to discuss this with Charles yet, and I was anxious to do so, unable to get anything right all day when sewing or cleaning.
I heard Charles come in the front door, and my agitation increased. I knew he’d take off his blue windbreaker and hang it on the coatrack in the hall before he went to wash his hands. I waited for him to come into the kitchen and sit at the table to talk while I finished cooking supper. When he finally walked in, he started a pot of coffee, a gesture that usually gave me a sense of comfort but that now irritated me. I didn’t ask him about his day like I always did. I barely let him sit down before I said, “Next time Vickie goes on a retreat, she needs more than a dollar.”
He put a spoonful of sugar into his empty coffee cup before he answered. “I don’t know why she needs more than that. That’s plenty to cover her lunch.”
“That’s only enough for a hot dog and Coke. It doesn’t leave anything for the gift shop.”
“She doesn’t need anything from the gift shop.”
“She just wanted a little something to take home. That’s all.” The coffeepot started percolating loudly, the brown liquid splashing furiously against the small glass knob on the metal top.
Charles stared at the coffeepot. “She’ll have to learn she can’t always have what everyone else does.”
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why Charles thought it was okay for our kids not to have the same opportunities as everybody else. If anyone knew how that felt, it was Charles. He had been the child who carried eggs and butter to school to pay for his lunches, wearing the same three outfits throughout the week. When we were growing up, my family was downright rich compared with his.
“But, Charles, she should have the same as everyone else, or she’ll feel left out. You don’t want that, do you?”
He got up and stood by the coffeepot to wait for it to finish percolating before he said what I knew he would. “I managed without and she can too.”
How many times had Charles told me that he’d survived as a child with less than the other kids and so could Vickie and Phillip? “You know, just because I walked a mile to the bus stop doesn’t mean I think Vickie and Phillip should have to do the same.” I took the green beans I’d snapped and rinsed them one more time before placing them in a mixing bowl. “That makes about as much sense as your mother baking her cakes on Saturday and locking them up until Sunday,” I continued in disbelief. I never did understand why Sunday was the only day sweets and fried chicken were allowed in Charles’s family.
Charles didn’t answer me. He poured his coffee and retreated to the living room with his cup.
“You need to do something about this pile of magazines in the den. I’m tired of the mess,” he yelled from the hallway.
I opened the drawer to find a mixing spoon and slammed it shut.
When we argued we were both on automatic, our frustrations becoming so intense, a thick invisible wall stood between us. We were trying so hard to be heard that we couldn’t hear each other. I didn’t understand some of Charles’s stubborn, crazy notions. We were so different at times. Charles found satisfaction scavenging up and down alleys and roads to find what he thought were perfectly good items someone had thrown away. He’d walk into the house lugging home his latest prize—a broken glass cabinet or lopsided bookshelves that he actually planned to use as furniture in our house. One day he brought home a gigantic barrel of every color of ribbon imaginable. For years the neighborhood women came to the house, staying as long as it took to roll up the endless yards of ribbon they needed.
I loved nothing better than finding a good deal at a discount store, but I wasn’t interested in furnishing my house with castoffs. More than anything, I wanted Vickie and Phillip to have a different childhood than we’d had; I wanted to do more than just get by. Charles had all he’d ever wanted: a wife and family. He liked the predictable routine I’d created—one that meant the car was washed, lawn mowed, cakes baked, and, yes, even the doorknobs polished every week. When I challenged him, I turned his dream upside down. He thought I was saying he was a failure.
I wasn’t. Deep down, I felt like the failure.
SOON AFTER the night I had the flat tire, I started experiencing searing headaches. Sometimes my head hurt so badly, I couldn’t see. I’d had the same “sick” headaches as a young girl. My mother would take me into Piedmont, guiding me up the long flight of wooden stairs to the doctor’s office, where he always gave me a small red pill that made me sleep for what seemed like days. Now, as an adult, I’d lie in my dark bedroom with the curtains closed and a wet washcloth over my eyes, keeping an ear out for the children.
As Charles and I scrambled weekly to pay for gas and speech therapy, he finally considered letting me work part-time. Frustrated with his own part-time job, Charles continued to search for a better, full-time opportunity. One afternoon he came home and told me about an opening at H&R Block in Anniston, the county seat, only a twenty-minute drive from our house. We went to Anniston whenever we needed something from Sears or J. C. Penney. The job sounded like a good possibility for Charles; but when he mentioned that it was part-time during tax season and that there was a math test to pass, I said, “Let me take it.”
In the fall of 1968, I signed up for the H&R Block tax-preparation course, and I passed the test a month later. The manager who hired me the following January agreed to let me skip lunch and leave at four-thirty to pick up Vickie and Phillip from Mrs. Harris’s after-school care.
I immediately fell in love with the job. I no longer felt so out of sorts, like some pollywog adrift in the water; instead, I had a goal to fulfill. I was paid minimum wage, $2.90 hour, against a draw, which was based on the number of tax returns I completed. The more returns I finished, the more I earned. We were paid $5 for each return, and I quickly devised a system to maximize my effort.
Each day I eagerly awaited customers, sitting behind my desk in my pink dress, navy hose, and white shoes, ready to operate my electronic calculator, the size of a shoe box, whose whirring muted the sound of the receptionist snapping her Juicy Fruit gum. It wasn’t long before the boss’s wife took me aside and suggested that I wear a different color combination. I stuck to polyester pant suits after that. At lunch I sat at my small metal desk, the gray carpet around me stained from coffee spills, and stirred my beef bouillon cubes in my cup of hot water until they dissolved. I kept my bottom desk drawer stocked with boxes of Lipton’s instant chicken noodle soup and Nestlé’s hot chocolate mix. Throughout the afternoon I sipped hot chocolate, my tongue trying to nudge loose the tiny pieces of rubbery marshmallow wedged in my teeth.
I never knew who would come walking through the door from one day to the next. It could be a restaurant owner with years of greasy, jumbled receipts I’d have to sort into order. The time the door swung open and a man appeared in the office carrying a large dry-cleaning box used to store a woman’s winter coat, the other agents averted their eyes and tried to look busy. I offered to help the man. Once he sat down, I handed him several books of matches we always gave our customers from a well-stocked bowl on my desk. He pulled a small ledger from the cardboard box, standing almost as tall as he was. Inside the black leather ledger were pages of perfectly kept records in a tight, neat script. I didn’t ask about his odd record-keeping system, and he didn’t offer an explanation.
Although I’d started working motivated solely by financial pressures, I soon found a greater reward as I exercised skills I didn’t know I possessed. I enjoyed aspects of the job most people hated. I was the only one in the office who actually liked it when we had to piece together the copy machine the supervisor dismantled on purpose, to test whether we could fix it on our own. Tinkering with the copier parts, I thought about the hours my father spent in the garage repairing his cars for an extra buck. That wasn’t work for him. He enjoyed it. Now I knew why.
At the end of the day when I clocked out, I rushed to pick up Vickie and Phillip. After I put the kids to bed, I left Charles, who, of course, was beside himself that I was leaving, at home watching All in the Family and returned to H&R Block to finish filling out the forms stacked up by my desk. During the three and a half months of my first tax season, I somehow managed to prepare five thousand returns.
Charles resented my long hours; they were hard on everyone. He’d immediately regretted agreeing to my working. In his eyes, my job took me away from our family and church, and he complained about everything to do with it—especially the fact that I was sometimes alone in the office late at night with only my manager.
The following summer I was offered a full-time position. I didn’t even consult with Charles. I knew he’d say no if I asked him about working the entire year. He’d only agreed to my working in the first place because it was something I could do during the short tax season, from January to April. I felt as though I was finally coming into my own, and I wasn’t about to let him take that away from me.
I accepted the offer on the spot.
WHEN I did tell Charles I’d taken a full-time position as the office manager, he acted as betrayed as if I’d had an affair. To show him I was no longer willing to be told how to live my life, at the end of my first week as office manager I marched, paycheck in hand, to the First National Bank in Anniston and opened my own checking account. When I’d completed all the forms, the banker pushed the papers back across the desk at me. I asked him what I’d missed.
He looked at my wedding ring. “Are you married?”
“Yes.” I looked at his left hand, trying to see where this conversation was headed.
“You forgot to fill in your husband’s name.”
I tasted the bitter residue from the packet of saccharin I’d poured into the cup of coffee he’d offered me when I sat down. I handed the forms back to him. “I’m opening a separate account.”
He was quiet for a minute. “It’s happening more and more these days,” he said.
“What’s that?” I glanced at the Anniston Star sitting on his desk. I thought he was referring to the headlines about the Vietnam War protests. My father, who worked at the Anniston Army Depot, viewed any antiwar sentiment as un-American; the demonstrations made Charles, a member of the National Guard, furious. I secretly sympathized with the protestors.
“You must be getting a divorce.”
“No, sir. As a matter of fact, I’m not.”
He shook his head. I wondered if he was going to give the paperwork back to me.
He rifled through it, signing below my name before he pulled an account booklet from his drawer.
“There must be some reason you’re opening a separate account,” he said, more to himself than to me, as he wrote my name at the top with my new account number and the amount I was depositing underneath.
I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t say that with my own bank account, I could prove to Charles how much of a difference my paycheck would make; and if I wanted to spend more on myself or the children, who was to stop me?
He handed the blank account booklet to me. “You’ll receive your new checks in the mail in about two weeks.”
A few days later, when I opened a charge card at Wakefield’s department store and applied for a Standard Oil gas card, I received the same response the banker had given me. This time I wasn’t surprised. When I told Charles about the account, he blew a gasket, raising his voice and then retreating to the garage for hours to wash and polish his car. The first time we split the household bills at the end of the month, he calmed down a bit.
Charles settled down even more when we were able to buy our dream house in Jacksonville several months later. For years, we’d drive into town on Sunday afternoons to admire houses and see what was on the market; now Vickie, tired of being so far from school, was begging us to move. We made a budget and started our search in earnest. Charles and I soon found a redbrick ranch house that we all loved on a small hill, tucked near the end of a long street at the foot of a wooded ridge. The yard was big enough for Charles to build a work shed in one day. The best part was that it was only blocks from school and the Jacksonville Baptist Church. In spite of its proximity to public places, our new home was located on a quiet street, and it wasn’t uncommon for us to see deer grazing in our yard or wake up to the ghostly mist of a morning fog.
Meanwhile, significant social movements were sweeping the country. Historic civil rights struggles were taking root in Alabama. No one in my family was sympathetic to the African Americans and northern agitators advocating change. I lived in a community where change came slowly, if at all; and when it did, it was often violent—as in the case of the firebombing of the Greyhound bus carrying Freedom Riders outside Anniston in 1961.
Both my parents had voted for George Wallace for governor in 1962. They applauded him when he stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama and so famously declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” His ranting and raving reminded me too much of Papa for him to get my vote. When politics came up for discussion at the Sunday dinner table, I kept my thoughts to myself to keep the peace. My parents’ voice was not my voice, as segregation seemed like a grave injustice to me.
When I opened a bank account to prove to Charles that he was being unfair, I made no conscious connection with the bra-burning feminists. At the same time, I felt a yearning so many women like me at all levels of society were feeling. I was determined to find a new path. I’d learned early on not to take no for an answer, and in the end I got my way by working. My daily path was no longer confined to trips to the grocery store and church. Charles and I also no longer worried about how to pay for speech therapy. Charles had initially dismissed Dr. Luther’s concern over Phillip, saying he’d come around in his own time, but when he saw Phillip’s progress, he seemed relieved. As Phillip improved by leaps and bounds each week at therapy, I was overwhelmed with joy. Now I could even treat him to ice cream afterward.
AS GRATEFUL as I was for the new challenges and the freedom more money gave me, many days I came close to giving up. I was unprepared for how tired I was working full-time—a feeling more debilitating than that leaden fatigue I’d experienced in the first trimester of pregnancy. I often wondered if I had the stamina to keep the pace up.
I’ll never forget the late afternoon I found Vickie and Phillip sitting on the curb outside Mrs. Harris’s house waiting for me in the descending darkness. Driving up to the house, I saw them huddled together, alone, in the dusk. Mrs. Harris had somewhere to go and had left them when I was running late. I was saturated with guilt. I hated that feeling of giving up my most important job—caring for my children—to someone else. I even felt jealous when Edna or Charles’s sister took care of the children.
One cool fall evening when I was making Hamburger Helper, Vickie asked me if she could help me cook. (Mixing a meal from a box and opening two cans of sweet peas wasn’t Edna’s definition of preparing a meal, but it was quick.) I let her pop open the soft can of Pillsbury crescent rolls by pressing it with the back of a spoon. As she folded the sticky dough on the pan she asked, “Can we make doughnuts after dinner?” At least once a week before I’d started at H&R Block, we made doughnuts together as a family, creating our own assembly line.
I opened a cabinet to see if we had the ingredients (even though I knew we didn’t) before I said, “We’re out of yeast and powdered sugar.”
Vickie sighed. “But we haven’t cooked them in such a long time.”
“I haven’t had time to go to the grocery store,” I replied too harshly. Noticing the dust balls by Vickie’s feet, I thought, I haven’t had time to vacuum, scrub the toilets, or wash a month’s worth of laundry, either. Vickie’s simple request irritated me because it highlighted my inability to get everything done; still, I was ashamed of my own irritation.
Hearing Vickie’s frustrated tone, I felt like the worst mother in the world. In the frenetic mornings getting ready for school and work, I yelled at the children when they didn’t deserve it. Watching Phillip scramble into my car, his shoes untied, I wanted to rewind and start the morning over, attending to everyone’s last little need. Instead, I was frazzled. Every morning as Vickie rushed out the door I frantically tried to brush her knotted hair. I watched her traipse into school wearing a mismatched outfit she’d proudly chosen herself, her blond hair still tangled in the back from her tossing in her sleep. The other little girls in her class walked by with perfect ponytails their mothers had lovingly fixed. No matter how much planning and organizing I did, I had to live with the fact someone or something was not always tended to properly. I had to face the self-loathing this created. Vickie’s question made me realize that I didn’t want to quit making doughnuts or carving pumpkins or baking Christmas cookies because I was too tired to get it all done.
I told Charles before bed that night that I’d quit work. At first he looked surprised, despite the fact that he’d staged his own protest by ambushing me almost daily with arguments on why I should quit. Then he hugged me as if the University of Alabama had just scored a touchdown. I was glad when he let me go and went to brush his teeth. I didn’t feel victorious; I felt deflated. I remembered all the times before I started working when I went to the A&P. I’d hold my breath during checkout as the cashier punched in the prices on the cash register. I was always within cents of my $20 limit, having kept a running tally of the groceries in my head, calculating the math before I placed each new item in my cart. To my relief, not once did I have to return anything to the shelves.
The next evening, before I started cooking dinner, I gathered the family in the living room. Charles told Vickie and Phillip that I was quitting.
Phillip asked, “Can we still go to Jack’s for a hamburger?”
A hamburger cost fifteen cents. That expense would have to go. I recalled all the times I unsuccessfully begged my mother for a bicycle or piano lessons. I couldn’t believe it, but here I was telling Phillip no.
“We’ll have to eat at home from now on. Hamburgers are too expensive.”
Phillip jumped up and started mimicking Cousin Cliff, singing the jingle for the Jack’s ad on TV. “You’ll go back, back, back … to Jack’s, Jack’s, Jack’s … for more, more, more!”
Vickie hushed Phillip and asked why I didn’t want to work anymore. When I explained that I couldn’t get all the housework done, she was silent at first, then she, too, became animated. “We can pitch in. I’ll clean my room every night before bed, and Phillip can clean his.” Vickie jumped up and ran into her bedroom, returning with a pencil and the lined writing paper she practiced her cursive writing on. “I’ll make a list for me and one for Phillip, and we can hang it on the refrigerator so we don’t forget.”
Right then, I knew that whether I chose to stay at home or continue working, I’d have to live with the guilt inherent in each decision.
I asked Phillip to find my car keys. We were going to Jack’s for dinner.
Once we made our decision, we created new family rituals. On Saturdays we divided the chores and cleaned the house. I made Charles do his own laundry after he ruined almost all of my clothes with the blue ink pens he forgot to empty out of his shirt pocket. Between morning church and evening services on Sundays I’d fix a big pot of spaghetti or soak some pinto beans with ham hock that Vickie would warm up during the week. As she got older, she learned to make corn bread and slaw to go with supper. Phillip liked to tease her about burning everything she cooked, but she looked after him, and they were always close. During Christmas vacation, the whole family gathered around the card table folding reminders to fifteen thousand H&R Block clients to complete their tax returns early. Then we stuffed the envelopes and separated them by zip code. Charles and I gave the kids the $400 H&R paid me.
Charles began shouldering a good portion of the responsibilities that had once fallen solely to me, such as picking up the kids from Mrs. Harris’s. As Vickie and Phillip became more involved in school activities, Charles was the one who participated in the PTA meetings, attended Phillip’s football and baseball games, and worked the concessions when Vickie was a cheerleader and in the marching band—I was grateful that not once did she have to worry about buying a uniform. Over time, he became accustomed to my working, and the day my paycheck became greater than his he finally accepted the fact that I had a knack for what I did. Eventually, he found a good job he liked as the housing administrator at Fort McClellan and stayed there until he retired, working his way up to the rank of command sergeant major and finishing his college degree.
CONTENT AT H&R Block, I thought once I started there, I’d stay and manage the office, prepare returns during tax season, and teach the fall tax-preparation class at night for the rest of my career. Working the line at GE, I might as well have been one anonymous figure in a string of cutout paper dolls. Now I had a chance to define myself through hard work. The seventies were a rocky time as far as the economy was concerned, beginning with the oil embargo in 1973, a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Exorbitant oil prices were soon followed by debilitating inflation, widespread layoffs, and the energy crisis defining the decade. What this meant for me was a layoff from H&R Block four years after I started working full-time.
When the state auditor who visited our office regularly recommended me for a position at an accounting firm in Gadsden, I took it. After a short stint there—I got tired of my paycheck bouncing—I became the officer manager at a small gynecologists’ office. My most challenging task, besides typing on a broken typewriter, was stocking up on boxes of Zest crackers and gigantic jars of pickles each month.
Hoping to go back full-time when the economy picked up, I also moonlighted at H&R Block. The doctors’ office just wasn’t for me, in more ways than one: I knew I was in the wrong place when they offered to perform a hysterectomy on me. Like the other women in the office, the doctors told me, I could keep the insurance check when it arrived, pocketing the much-needed few hundred dollars, in exchange for letting them sharpen their surgery skills. I was hard up for cash but not desperate enough to give away a perfectly good uterus.
Before long, I was talking to a friend at church and found out about an opening at Jacksonville State University in the financial aid office. I wasted no time pursuing the job. At the end of the interview, the financial aid director, Larry, a lanky guy with a mustache, told me, “You’ve got my vote. Now my wife and secretary just have to approve.” An easygoing, kind woman, his wife warned me that working with Larry would be like walking on eggshells, since he had low blood sugar. As his assistant, I got along with him just fine. Whenever he’d get really cranky, he’d pull a boiled egg from his coat pocket, or as if he were a magician, a sausage biscuit would appear out of nowhere. Most of the time he just paced the office eating spoonfuls of peanut butter from the largest jar I’d ever seen.
The day I started work, I walked onto campus thinking about what my life would have been like had I gone there, if only my mother had let me earn college credit my senior year. I didn’t dwell on it too much. In my own way, I’d gotten to college after all. Working on campus and helping eager, grateful students in need go to college was something I looked forward to daily.
Unfortunately, without my own college degree, I could only achieve so much financial success at the university. After I’d been working with Larry for three years, H&R Block contacted me, as I’d hoped, to become the district manager for the Anniston office when my old manager left. By then H&R Block had around seven thousand offices and opened a new office seemingly every minute. The pay was double my university salary, and as much as I enjoyed helping students and appreciated the academic setting, I had to move on.
I returned to H&R Block in 1976 and stayed there until 1979, in the end managing fourteen offices. One busy morning as I was reading Business Week, I was struck by an article about Goodyear. Just as the technology behind making tires was changing with the newly constructed radial-tire plant built in 1976, so, too, was management philosophy; it was now emphasizing a team approach.
I thought about the stories I heard growing up, the bloody tales of violence between union men and management. They were legendary, like the well-known local ghost stories. I remembered Aunt Robbie talking about her own uncle, who went into hiding during a strike to keep from being killed. My uncles had often referred to “the reign of terror,” the time before World War II when workers tried to unionize and labor organizers were beaten viciously on the main street in the middle of the day. According to the article, times had changed.
I finished the article and held the magazine in my lap, considering, for the first time, the real possibility of working at Goodyear—the article had also said that women were becoming part of this new management team. I had no idea what went on behind those redbrick walls sprawling for acres next to the Coosa River. How a tire was actually made was beyond my comprehension. I thought about my friend Sandra wearing a different sweater set every day and the beach vacations and shiny Mercurys Goodyear provided her and her family. Maybe working at Goodyear could give me that stability I needed for the rest of my working life. I’d started late, entering the workforce when I was thirty-one, and I’d gone as far as I could at H&R Block without moving to another state.
One of my most pressing concerns was college tuition now that Vickie was almost halfway through college at Jacksonville State University. Seeing both Vickie and Phillip successfully attend college was one of my greatest dreams, and I’d cashed out my retirement each time I’d made a job change to create a college savings plan.
For a while, I’d been worried that Vickie was headed down the wrong path and wouldn’t even make it as the first person in our family to go to college. She’d been such a well-behaved young girl, but she’d started hanging with a rough crowd about the time she learned how to drive. Her teen years had certainly put a strain on Charles and me. She and her friends would do things like get one friend’s little dog drunk. Thank goodness, by the time she graduated from high school, she’d finally settled down. I couldn’t help but feel that my work-induced absence partly caused her rebellion. Maybe she’d been too responsible too young and wanted freedom from the burden of being such a good and helpful child. Now in her second year of college, she was serious about her studies, and too busy working part-time at the Dairy Dip (and as a receptionist at my office during tax season) to get into too much trouble. I wanted to make sure she would have whatever she needed to keep her life on track.
As I approached forty-one, I was also beginning to realize that life was moving faster than I’d planned. There was only so much time left to accomplish what needed to get done—to establish a greater sense of security for my family. Phillip would be in college soon, and I still needed to build a good retirement. I felt I wouldn’t have many more chances left to achieve a certain degree of professional success. The youthful luxury of imagining I had all the time in the world to get it right was long gone. Facing the last half of my life, I understood how important the choices I made were.
I’d also been taken off guard by Edna’s recent diagnosis of mouth cancer during the summer. Considering that my grandmother Lillie had died young from cancer, Edna was convinced she was also going to die. After the woman behind the Merle Norman counter told her they didn’t have any makeup to cover her sallow complexion, Edna liked to say, “Don’t worry about buying me anything—I won’t be living by the time Christmas comes.”
In light of the fact that she’d had colon cancer ten years earlier, the diagnosis wasn’t surprising. She’d also dipped snuff and smoked all her life. She never understood why when we’d moved into our new house in town, I made her stand on the front step to smoke; one reason was that I’d had enough of customers blowing smoke in my face all day at the office, but I also hated the stale smell of cigarette smoke clinging to my upholstered furniture.
What didn’t make sense was the idea of burying my mother. In her late fifties, she was too young, and I wasn’t ready to stand at her graveside. As difficult as she could be to deal with, the idea of life without Edna gave me a strange sense of vertigo. Now, as I saw what Edna called “liver spots” beginning to appear on the back of my hands, I felt the inevitable limitations of time constricting me as surely as the small wrinkles punctuating my knuckles like parentheses. My aging alarmed me.
I PLACED the magazine on my desk, planning to take it home and show Charles. Just thinking about the fact that Goodyear was hiring female managers for the first time in the history of the company gave me goose bumps. I rubbed my arms and relished what felt like a door opening when I’d thought for sure, at this point in my life, the doors were only closing.
Charles seemed surprised when I informed him of my decision to apply for a position at Goodyear. I took a personal day and put in my application anyway. As I sat in the human resources office filling out the endless forms, I read the plaque that hung on the wall in front of me. I mouthed the Vince Lombardi quotation engraved in gold to myself: FOOTBALL IS A LOT LIKE LIFE; IT REQUIRES PERSEVERANCE, SELF-DENIAL, HARD WORK, SACRIFICE, DEDICATION, AND RESPECT FOR AUTHORITY. It made sense to me. If that was what was required to work there, I was ready. A signed picture of coach Bear Bryant hung next to the plaque. I couldn’t wait to tell Charles—when Phillip was born on the same day as “the Bear,” he couldn’t have been more tickled.
After the long interview, I wondered how many other women had applied. The only women I’d seen so far were secretaries in the front offices where I’d submitted my application, but I knew Aunt Robbie had worked there. One time when I was a little girl, I’d asked her what she did. She laughed at first. Then she said she’d started in shipping, where she “cut the tits off tires,” meaning, she finally explained, that she sliced the thin rubber protrusions off. I thought about her wielding a razor with the same hands she used for knitting and tatting. Aunt Robbie had been hired during World War II, when women manned the plant, making jeep tires, rubber soles for shoes, raincoats, and anything else the military needed. Even after the men returned from war, she managed to stay—refusing, she told me, to accept Goodyear’s offer in 1960 to buy her a brand-new house if she’d take early retirement. By then, she and Uncle Howard had built their own nice house with a swimming pool. She worked at Goodyear for twenty-seven years, until heart problems and a back injury forced her to retire.
Leaving the plant after my interview, I passed photographs of the men from “Mahogany Row” in Akron, Ohio, lining the paneled hallway—the same men whose biographies I had no idea I’d be memorizing soon. I stopped for a minute and took a deep breath, staring at the black-and-white portraits of these men who exuded such a sense of power. I tried to imagine their lives: how it felt to run a corporation, travel the world, and dine at the country club. It was a life about which I could only fantasize. At least I had this chance to make my life better—a chance I’d never believed possible as a child.
On the way home I stopped to check on my mother. Blocking the doorway, she was dressed in her housecoat, her dentures still sitting in their usual spot on her bathroom sink now that her mouth was too sore for her to wear them. I announced that I’d applied to work as a manager at Goodyear. She didn’t offer to let me in but cut her sharp eyes at me and asked, “Shouldn’t you be doing what a woman’s supposed to do?”
My shoulders tightened. A familiar feeling of frustration flooded my stomach. No matter how old I was, it always snuck up on me when something Edna said hurt my feelings. Throughout my life there had remained something stuck between us, something as elemental as two charged electrons repelling each other. It wasn’t one particular thing she did or said but the accumulation of all of the small things: the hard look that could stare a hole right through you, the critical tone of voice, the wall she erected between herself and the rest of the world even though she was always doing for others—myself and the children included.
Vickie was the one who got the best of Edna those early years of her childhood when she and Phillip stayed with her on the farm in the summer while I worked at H&R Block. She was so good to Vickie, I’d have to remind her that she had two grandchildren. When the children became more independent, I’d go through phases of distancing myself from Edna, being too busy with work, even when she and my father moved a stone’s throw away after Papa died. I’d often fooled myself into thinking that I no longer cared whether or not I measured up in her eyes, yet here I was again, returning to her doorstep, seeking her recognition.
When Edna finally decided to invite me in, I didn’t stay. I searched for my car keys in my purse and told her to get some rest. She looked tired. It was clear she didn’t feel well. Besides, I was too old for such childish nonsense, and I knew enough to recognize and accept that Edna was doing the best she could, as she always had. Really, how could I fault her if she didn’t know how to love me the way I wanted, if she never once said the words “I love you”? How could I blame her for only knowing how to survive by freezing her feelings, playing dead like a possum? It was the one thing I’d learned to do best, and it’s what would keep me alive during the hard times waiting for me just around the corner at Goodyear.
